In very short order Fatal Frame II has twice quickly upended my understanding of the world that I have been placed in. Maya walks by her to look at a house, but the hand is still there. Her sister places a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and Mio grasps it. In another cutscene, Mio kneels down after she has seen a vision. The only noise is the noticeable crunch of gravel beneath their feet. You have no choice but to make both characters go forward. Mio crosses a Shinto gate and meets up with her sister overlooking a village from a mountain pass. Something that took me doubly by surprise because I laid my controller on my desk and it created a very loud clattering sound. Things begin to blur as the very air begins to vibrate, which is communicated directly to the player via the rumble feature of the controller. The camera shakes around and changes angles very quickly. After looking around, she finds her sister going deeper into the forest following some crimson butterflies. Mio is talking, and when she turns around, Maya is gone. It opens with a cutscene of twin sisters Mio and Maya in a bright idyllic looking forest clearing. Few games can throw a player so off kilter so quickly. However, due to the nature of the interactive cycle, there is a limit to how much you can upend the expectations of input and output.Ītmospherically, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly is one of the creepiest games that I’ve ever played. It is important both how it feels for the player to input commands as it is to how it feels to receive a response in moment to moment interactions. Video games in particular are tactile in nature due to a constant connection to the controller or other input device that connects the player to the game. One of the less acknowledged forms in games is the feel of play. In horror, the interest lies in twisting and prolonging expectations, all the way to their breaking points.Īt a more fundamental level, the mediums in which a particular work is a part of have different methods for conveying meaning. In comedy, the interest of the artist is in subverting expectations and changing directions at the last moment. The end goal and therefore methods for achieving it, of course, being somewhat different. The horror genre is in part built upon the notion of upending expectations.

Fatal frame 2 crimson butterfly